The Mekong devnet was meant to be a playground for wallet developers to experiment with UX changes and for stakers to gain confidence in the upcoming Pectra changes.

The Pectra network upgrade has been activated on the Ethereum Sepolia and Holesky testnets. These networks can now be used to test the Pectra upgrade features. In light of this, we'd like to announce the deprecation of the Mekong testnet on 7th March, 2025.

Application and tooling developers are encouraged to use Sepolia to test applications, smart contracts, and other EVM functionality. Its permissioned validator set provides a stable test environment. Alternatively, many local development environments allow for testing against copies of the Ethereum mainnet state.

Stakers and infrastructure providers concerned with protocol-level testing are encouraged to wait for the Holesky testnet to finalize, or to await an announcement on the Ethereum R&D discord for an alternate testing location. For validator setup testing, stakers should also consider the Ephemery testnet. This network resets weekly and enables lightweight end-to-end testing of the validator lifecycle.